Why is the Moderator Council's role in the new reinstatement process such weak sauce?

Question

The setting

Two months ago, the "Moderator Council" was introduced, with a simple charter:

a small group to escalate urgent or important issues or review our work before we make it public

Yesterday, this group was cited in the revised moderator reinstatement process:

[A previous moderator] can choose to escalate their request for Mod Council evaluation and is able to add additional material/arguments for further consideration.

[...]

While the recommendation of the Mod Council is not binding, their recommendation and reasoning will be considered very seriously by the CLT when coming to a final decision.

IOW, they get, uh, a collective bullet in a list of things to consider. But it's a bold bullet, near the top of the list.

Crucially, their role in this process isn't to review the work of the staff before it goes out. By the time the council is involved, that work has already been "published" twice - and the former moderator has had to make the decision to appeal twice instead of just saying, "sorry, constituents, they ain't gonna let me serve."

The dissonance

So while I'm trying to square this new role with the original charter, I come across this now-deleted answer proposing a role more in line with that charter:

Trust goes both ways. If you really trust the moderator council, consider letting the moderator council have the final say on reinstatement, if council members are willing to take on this responsibility (with perhaps the community leadership team stepping in in case the moderator council is deadlocked).

...and below it, a revealing comment from a member of the council:

I believe this was even proposed at one point but was shot down by several members of the council (not SE).

Well. So it would seem the first concrete action by the council was... To reject any actual responsibility? Surely that can't be right...

Another council member elaborated, slightly:

I've personally felt, and still do feel that the moderator council represents the moderator community, but we're not some sort of super-moderator. With at least the current iteration - its possible we don't see eye to eye on quite a few topics, but that's natural. I suspect should we get called to review a moderator reinstatement, you'll get an answer most of the council members reviewing can accept, even if its not their ideal.

This... Made no sense to me, so we discussed it for a bit and as the author wished for additional space to respond I composed this question.

The crux

My concern in brief: the council's charter was to represent the moderators and review the work of the company. That's exactly what is called for in a reinstatement process. Either the council is willing to take an active role in ensuring that moderators are treated fairly, or they've abdicated the responsibility that they were elected to shoulder.

So... Which is it?

Answer 1

Moderator Council pro-tem member here. This is my opinion on this, so others may have a different take. Looking forward to what Journeyman Geek and Rubiksmoose have to add - I'm sure they'll have some good takes, along with anyone else on the Council.

I think that the "simple charter" of "a small group to escalate urgent or important issues or review our work before we make it public" is mostly accurate. Of course, we are still working on defining how the Moderator Council fits in with various company processes. How we fit into the Moderator Removal and Moderator Reinstatement processes is one of the processes that we looked at as a group.

During the discussions, I had supported injecting the Moderator Council at other steps in the process for reinstatement, and perhaps the removal process as well. One of the problems raised in doing so is that it would significantly slow down the process.

I believe the timeline for the first three steps in reinstatement (Mod Applies for Reinstatement, CM Appointment, Documentation, and CM Evaluation) is ideally measured in hours of actual work and very few business days. The slowest part of the standard process is the Mod Team Evaluation, which is 3-5 days for the mod team to respond. It could be done sooner if enough of the mod team respond sooner.

The idea is for most of the reinstatement requests to end here. That would mean that most reinstatement requests would be resolved in less than two calendar weeks.

My understanding is that most of the rejections in the first step of the process would either be (1) the moderator was removed due to repeated or severe violations of agreements, such as abuse of moderator tools/data or (2) rejection from the current mod team not wanting to work with the mod. There's not much the Moderator Council can or should do in these cases that would lead to reinstatement.

For those reinstatement requests that do continue, again, the process is swift. The CLT Evaluation is a relatively short step that happens quickly after the appeal. The longest part in Escalation 1 is the second Mod Team Review, which takes up to 5 business days.

I'd expect that most Escalation 1 steps are completed in a calendar week (give or take a couple of days, depending on when the request to escalate was submitted).

Injecting a second, formal review from a group of volunteers will easily add 3-5 days to the process - almost a full week. You'd go from effectively one calendar week (give or take a day or so) to nearly two calendar weeks for the basic process to complete or from close to two calendar weeks for the appeal to almost three weeks.

Although it's not called out, my interpretation of the Moderator Council is that we provide services to the company in the form of review and advice. We also offer services to moderators and communities. I don't see why a site's mod team can't choose to engage the Moderator Council during their Mod Team Evaluation. Likewise, I don't see a reason why the CM Team couldn't engage the Moderator Council during Documentation and CM Evaluation. A moderator, a moderator team, or a community can come to the Moderator Council with concerns at any time and we can evaluate it and escalate it to the CM Team or CLT. So we can be asked to get involved in the removal process or bring up concerns where the removal process was not properly executed.

Rather than injecting ourselves as a step in most executions of process, I see the Moderator Council being more valuable in reviewing the process itself. I would expect that the Moderator Council is made aware whenever the removal or the reinstatement process is started, where it currently sits, and what the outcomes of each step are. We can make sure that there is appropriate transparency between the company and the mod team and with the affected community (or communities). If we find that the process is slow, unfair, or needs improvements, we can work with the company to fix it.

To specifically answer the question:

I don't think we've abdicated the responsibility to ensure that moderators are treated fairly. We have early access to provide advice about decisions that impact moderators and the broader community. Specifically, in the context of removals and reinstatements, our input and feedback on the process should help guide how future events are handled. Our involvement in the actual execution of the process itself is that of an exception handler.

Answer 2

In theory, one would hope that in two rounds of the company reviewing a moderator removal, an incorrect one would get weeded out. We shouldn't be needed because before we get involved, the right thing is done.

Where that fails - presumably we'll have the opportunity to advocate for the moderator in question - dig up what needs to be dug up and hopefully find flaws in the process.

Practically if a moderator is removed for the wrong reasons - the process of lobbying the company and letting them know where we stand, formally or informally ought to start pretty early on.

Trust goes both ways. If you really trust the moderator council, consider letting the moderator council have the final say on reinstatement, if council members are willing to take on this responsibility (with perhaps the community leadership team stepping in in case the moderator council is deadlocked).

This has a element of realpolitik. The company should listen to us cause they trust us - not because they are obliged to. I'm pretty sure a reluctant company has ways to put roadblocks - but that could happen both ways.

Where reinstatement is concerned - having a strong enough voice to be listened to is something that feels more useful than to be essentially an arbitration body between the company and the moderator in question. Practically - I suspect its reflection of a moderation culture that's focused on soft influence over positional power.

I've personally felt, and still do feel that the moderator council represents the moderator community, but we're not some sort of super-moderator. With at least the current iteration - its possible we don't see eye to eye on quite a few topics, but that's natural. I suspect should we get called to review a moderator reinstatement, you'll get an answer most of the council members reviewing can accept, even if its not their ideal.

Admittedly, this reflects a few different threads of thought on the subject

I've personally felt, and still do feel that the moderator council represents the moderator community, but we're not some sort of super-moderator

Our role is to help voice out what the moderator community feels, rather than to be a "leadership" role or first amongst equals. I'll get to the super-moderator bit at the end.

With at least the current iteration - its possible we don't see eye to eye on quite a few topics, but that's natural.

It's a fairly diverse group, and with the folks involved, I'm aware we have wildly differing backgrounds and views on current issues. As such - in some cases, where we're consulted in such a situation, the result is unlikely to be a complete consensus but rather something balancing those views.

As for super moderators - the moderator council isn't really responsible for taking on the full weight of community management and leadership. We're still kind of working out the balance of responsibility but fundamentally, we'll advise, we'll meddle, we'll even advocate. But that's not a replacement for the company being aware and getting things right, even if they often don't.

Practically I hope that this and future iterations of the moderator council are essentially

Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

On a larger scale: we'll point out the bugs in the social system, but we'll need help to fix ’em.